Anticyclone
by readerofasaph
Summary: In which Kise buys an apartment, everyone tries to move in, the Generation of Miracles grow up (or fail to grow up, as it happens), and existential quarter-life crises occur. (Set during the year after the Miragen finish high school.)


Kise owned the apartment, though he lived in it least. He'd bought the place at the advice of his accountant, for reasons like tax minimisation and falling interest rates and a long list of ideas Kise paid other people to worry about so he didn't have to. Three bedrooms, city view, modern minimalist décor, stainless steel fixtures, all the better for a group of college age boys who despised cleaning, not that being a landlord had been part of Kise's original plan. By the time he realised he'd acquired one tenant (a slow awkward epiphany involving martinis, multiple basketball players, an incomprehensible lecture by Midorima on feng shui, and Akashi looking up thrice from his Android shougi app to raise a brow) he'd somehow acquired two, and by the time he was rational enough to rethink his decision they were already in his living room, boxes and baggage and all.

"Just until summer," said Murasakibara, as if he were capable of long-term planning beyond two days at a time.

"Until the renovations are over and my flat stops being unlucky," said Midorima, more or less sincerely.

So it was that Kise celebrated his housewarming with the two Teikou regulars who had, without fail, every single damn day of third year and most of second year, made him feel like shit. Murasakibara ate his way through a trunkful of prepackaged snacks and Midorima rearranged houseplants for two hours fixing the kitchen's qi flow. It was all nostalgic and entertaining to watch but Kise had a plane to catch so he gave them spare keys and his bank account details in the vague hope that they'd pay rent, before calling the taxi to Narita.

On arrival in Milan he texted Kagami – the only person Kise knew who could handle both housework _and_ Murasakibara with reliability. _Make sure they don't let the kitchen sink grow mould? I'll get you an autograph from the idol of your choice._

_Who do you think I am, Ahoumine?_, came the grumpy reply. _Will check this Wednesday, let you know._

It was a whole four days to Wednesday and a lot could go wrong in that time, Kise felt, but between jet-lag and Fashion Week his imagination was given no time to brood on possible disasters. He did not think again about his housemates until Kagami's update arrived before sunrise Thursday morning:

_Situation not too bad. Murasakibara broke dryer, Midorima organised repairman. Can we borrow your basketball pump?_

Kise studied the words on his cellphone and smiled despite his sleep deprivation, then group messaged all three of them: _It's in the broom closet. There's an indoor court on the first floor next to the gym. Don't play in the corridors, you might break the vases._

_A fine thought from someone who shattered two of my porcelain darumas last year,_ Midorima shot back a moment later.

_That was all Aominechi, I swear._ He stuck his iPhone on the bedside table and let his head fall back on his pillow, suddenly missing home.

Ah well, they'd probably still be at it when he got back.

#

Kise could never figure out where Midorima found the time to do everything he did. (Other people said the same thing about Kise, but the obvious explanation was that Kise, unlike Midorima, wasn't a rigid compulsive perfectionist.) Midorima was in medical school and playing college ball, but found time to shoot recreational hoops for two hours every day: an hour with Murasakibara or Kise or whoever happened to be visiting at the time, an hour by himself before dawn, pure shooting practice, over and over again.

It was amazing to Kise that Midorima never got tired of doing this, but then Kise never tired of watching it either: the ball in its perfect slow trajectory, falling to target without deviation, inevitable as physics and destiny.

He'd wandered downstairs to watch Midorima one morning when Midorima tossed him the basketball. "Your turn," he said, with a guarded look.

Catching Midorima's meaning, Kise moved to beneath the hoop and aimed.

Midorima was left-hand dominant but that had made copying his three-pointers easier in a way, just a mirroring of movements, at least until it was committed to physical memory and the final task left was to discover the alchemy that transformed the technique from someone else's to his own. The trouble with Perfect Copy was that it wasn't, could never be; ninety-nine percent complete could fool somebody like Momoi even, but Kise's whole body felt the single percentage remainder.

Most of the time he thought the distance between real and fake was easily enough explained, although impossible to breach; it was simply that Midorima had spent uncounted years like this, aiming in the dark, day in and day out, and Kise had not. On other occasions he thought the dissimilarity was less concrete and more profound. Midorima believed in fate, whereas Kise did not, and this made an unquantifiable but incontrovertible difference in the way the ball rose in the air from their fingers.

"I'll never do it like you do," he said, as the basketball fell dead centre through the opposite hoop. These days Kise did not feel apologetic, not about himself or his way of basketball or even about not getting it right. But when he was younger there had been times when he felt as if he should be sorry, mostly about not being good enough, even as he delighted in the newness of failure, in the pleasure of finding something true and difficult and worthwhile.

"How like you to state the obvious," said Midorima.

Midorima shot, then Kise took another turn, then they fell into one-on-one for the next twenty minutes, until morning light crept through the windows. Murasakibara went to bed at sunset and woke with the sunrise, and Kise wanted to go back upstairs before Murasakibara got hungry and it was all too late, before the eggs were burned and the bacon blackened, before the smoke detector flashed and whined and Kise got billed a second time for triggering a building evacuation.

It'd taken about a fortnight to establish each household member's specialised skillsets. Midorima cooked, cleaned and ironed, but performed all these things with relative reluctance and did only his own share of the housework; he showed some tolerance of Murasakibara's chaotic lifestyle but cut Kise no such slack. It was unsurprising, admittedly, that Midorima should have an endless capacity to keep score of laundry sins and whose turn it was to buy more milk; Kise would have been more annoyed about it if it weren't for the fact that Midorima was scrupulously fair about the whole process.

Murasakibara's idea of doing laundry was throwing whites together with colors and linen and then shaking a random amount of detergent into the washing machine before starting it; the first and only time he'd vacuumed, the dust bag had exploded and the floor had ended up dirtier than before he started. Kise half-suspected he'd done it on purpose just to get out of the cleaning roster, although it was hard to tell if Murasakibara was capable of that much dissimulation.

The one thing Murasakibara was good at was making sweets. On a daily basis the apartment was assailed by the scent of chocolate being melted, by the flavours of butter and cinnamon, rich and sweet and warm. Trays of a neverending variety of confections - macarons and éclairs and Portugese tarts - appeared on the stonework kitchen bench each morning and evening, to the point where Kise gained three pounds and had to double his cardio time for a month.

For all this baking prowess Murasakibara apparently couldn't make yakisoba without burning it; they had the ruined woks (five) to prove it. He lived on takeaway bento boxes and prawn crackers until Midorima, out of sheer resignation, began cooking for him as well.

Overall, Kise thought, the arrangement was going far less precariously than expected, considering who his flatmates were. He even managed to suppress the urge to spend money on professional cleaners - at least, until Aomine showed up.

#

At the end of spring Kise took the overnight flight back from London and arrived home bleary-eyed, his clothes still reeking of No. 19 and spilled gin and the cigar smoke yesterday's fashion editor had blown all over him, and paused at the front door when he saw the long tanned figure sprawled across the white new sofa.

Aomine was spinning a basketball atop his left middle finger, face half-lost in thought, and when he saw Kise he nodded almost imperceptibly but did not volunteer any more acknowledgement than this, as if it were perfectly natural for him to be occupying Kise's living room at eight in the morning.

Kise set his suitcase down by the shoe rack. "Did Murasakibarachi invite you over?" he asked, not being able to imagine Midorima voluntarily doing so.

Aomine flicked the ball up, watched it veer dangerously close to the ceiling lights, then let it fall before hitting it with the flat of his fingers and sending it flying over to Kise, who caught it one-handedly.

"Do I need an invite?" Aomine asked.

Kise thought about it and shrugged. "I guess no, I suppose not, but-" It was then that he noticed the haphazard pile of luggage and boxes piled up at the back of the living area, right next to the breakfast counter that marked out where the kitchen began. "Aominechi, your landlords can't have kicked you out _already_."

"Hell no, I moved out myself. Couldn't stand the noise." Aomine looked expectantly at Kise, wanting to continue the passing game, but Kise was all too aware of the designer bookcase and the glass coffee table and the small cube-shaped vase Midorima had stuck on the dining table, filled with four-leaf clover. "I asked Kagami if I could crash with him for a bit, but he said over his dead body."

There was a basketball rack next to the shoe rack and Kise returned the ball he was holding to the topmost shelf, to join its multitudinous brethren. "You asked Kagamichi first?"

Aomine paused, then laughed. "Are you annoyed about that? Some days you're as bad as Tetsu."

Some days Kise _hated_ Aomine, although the impulse was always easily enough quelled by other sentiments between them, older and more complex and difficult than either love or hate.

He could say no, right there and then, just as he could have refused Midorima and Murasakibara; in the end he did not owe them anything, and one way or another they would have coped. But when it came down to it he had not wanted to say no, had not wanted to terminate the thing between the six of them that had survived Teikou and beyond, had not wanted to say goodbye to these people, who had infuriated Kise and brought him to laughter and and sorrow, who had made him feel small, for the first time in his life, and then gave him the only thing about himself he had ever been proud of.

_Comrades_, Akashi would say. Kise wouldn't have put it quite that way.

"There's no bedrooms left but I've got some futons I can put out in the study," said Kise, and then because he wished to feel more in control of the situation, he smiled. Not even Murasakibara, not even Kuroko, was wholly impervious when Kise smiled. "Welcome home, Aominechi."

Aomine studied Kise's face as if expecting to find something other than what he saw, but then shrugged. "Welcome home, Kise."

#

Aomine living here meant that Kagami visited more often, and Momoi and therefore Kuroko. Himuro came over on weekends, and Takao on weeknights, and the Kaijou crowd whenever Kise happened to be in Tokyo for more than three days at a stretch. At times the place felt more like a thoroughfare than a luxury high-rise.

He got back on a Friday evening from filming a television commercial in Karuizawa to find the apartment packed to the rafters. Himuro and Murasakibara sat on spindly-legged bar stools at the breakfast counter, flipping through glossy recipe books. Takao lay curled on a plush bean bag, fiddling with his cellphone while throwing out the occasional remark at Midorima, who was at the dining table bent over his laptop.

Momoi and Kuroko and Aomine were gathered on the sofa, watching NBA reruns on the plasma television; Kuroko sitting at the centre, quiet and unremarkable and ordinary as ever. Years of playing with Kuroko, against Kuroko, meant that Kise's attention arrowed in on the nondescript boy, his focus caught there like moth wings in a spider's web.

He knelt behind the sofa to blow lightly at the back of Kuroko's head. "Kurokochi!"

"Kise-kun," Kuroko said, and gave no other indication that he had noticed Kise's arrival.

Momoi turned and beamed at him. "Ki-chan! It's been ages!"

Predictably, Aomine was oblivious to Kise's arrival and indeed the world until the televised game was over, at which point he leaned back and half-shut his eyes, ready to drop into sleep. Kuroko preempted this by pressing the cold wet rim of a beer can into the crook of Aomine's neck, provoking a yelp and a curse from the taller boy. A tussle on the sofa ensued between the two, Momoi delicately removing herself from the vicinity right on cue.

"Have you had dinner, Ki-chan? Muk-kun made profiteroles for dessert, if you want some."

Kise let his lips curve into a pout. "You're as cruel as ever, Momochi. Didn't you hear that I'm on a diet this month?"

She glanced up and down the length of his body, appraising; it was the sort of professional gaze Kise was subject to constantly at work. "Hmm, is that so, Ki-chan? You're thinner than you were when you were playing for Kaijou, though."

She flashed him that ever _knowing_ smile of hers and he ended up eating three cream-filled profiteroles only to give himself indigestion an hour later, when they all filed downstairs for an impromptu game.

It was quick and furious and afterwards Kise's stomach was sickeningly nauseous, not that he regretted any of his decisions that evening. Aomine and Kuroko had been on the same side tonight, as they rarely were these days, and seeing the combination had filled Kise with nostalgia and an awe he had not felt in years.

If you loved basketball, if you were any kind of basketball player, and never got a chance to see Aomine and Kuroko play together, you were missing out. They'd had three years of Kagami and Kuroko on the courts, and that was beautiful and unbelievable in its own way; but Aomine's feral speed and Kuroko's bare presence, the way the ball moved and snaked across the court with unpredictable momentum when those two worked together, that was something that no one else would ever replicate.

Aomine had been signed to a bj-league team before their last Winter Cup was over, and Kuroko had just joined his university basketball club. If they ever played together again, it would be at times like these: social, informal, and serendipitous.

It should have changed everything between them, but it changed nothing, as far as Kise could see. At eighteen Kuroko looked at Aomine exactly the way he had when he was thirteen; subtly yet definitely, with a quiet certainty that almost drew chills - surely, no one in the world had any reason to have that much faith in another person. But of course Kise felt the same way about Aomine and perhaps always would.

Aomine, for his part, was far less obvious even to Kise's practised eye. There was an undercurrent of his attention that remained always on Kuroko, both on the court and off. But it was the nature of Aomine that he was always so casually observant, so apparently disinterested and yet preternaturally aware, that when it came to Kuroko, among other things, it was difficult to gauge the real depth of his focus.

If there was one difference Kise could pinpoint from years of watching Aomine, it was that Aomine was young with Kuroko, as he was when together with Momoi, and as he was with no one else.

Kise had always wanted to be between those two, somehow; first he'd wanted the one and then the other and then the one again. Even now it was painful, in some small sense, to watch Kuroko jamming a broken half of a profiterole into Aomine's unguarded open mouth, lightning-quick, and then to see Aomine pause for a bare moment, before swallowing the thing in one gulp and then hauling Kuroko by the collar over to the kitchen bench, where he proceeded to force-feed Kuroko all the leftover choux pastry, until the smaller boy said, "Aomine-kun, I've reached my limit."

With that statement the horseplay stopped, smoothly and instantly as it'd begun; Aomine poured Kuroko a glass of water before pouring himself one, and they stood in silence, not looking at each other but not letting anyone else in either.

A space no outsiders could enter.

"Will your furniture be okay, Ki-chan?" asked Momoi anxiously, looking around at the crumpled beer cans and scattered bottle caps and the fine pastry crumbs covering every possible surface.

Kise gave a rueful grin. "It's withstood Murasakibarachi for nearly two months," he said. "I really wouldn't worry about it, Momochi."

#

"So you're not playing basketball."

It was kind of a badly-phrased statement, Kise thought, considering that he and Kasamatsu were right in the middle of a game. He made the layup, caught the ball right as it fell through the hoop, and moved into an easy dribble. "I'm still playing basketball _all the time_. I'm living with Murasakibarachi, remember? Not to mention Aominechi."

By now it was June and Murasakibara was still living in Kise's apartment; still – as Himuro Tatsuya put it – 'discovering himself' while fending off pro scouts every third day. By now the recruiters had gotten so desperate they were physically bringing gift hampers of confectionery to the front door to lure Murasakibara with.

"There's nothing about himself to _discover_," Midorima had snarled, after tripping over the tangled mess of cellophane paper and department store ribbon and empty Cadbury tins that Murasakibara had left right outside Midorima's room. "He eats, sleeps, bakes, and plays basketball, and that's pretty much _all he does_. We could have told him this when he was at Teikou. He needs to sign a contract with someone, anyone, before he kills himself from overeating and too much spare time." And before Midorima died of apoplexy, was the unspoken implication.

Aomine had yawned. "If he doesn't want to go pro then it's his problem, not yours, isn't it? Just let it go."

Midorima had glared, Aomine had looked bored, and Kise had gratefully headed off to Paris to let them hash it out between themselves. It was just as well that the renovations on Midorima's flat had finished a week later and the household was back to being a trio. The cleaners were coming in three times a week these days – twice weekly wasn't nearly enough to keep up with Murasakibara's chaos now that Midorima was no longer there to stem the tide – but everyone fought far less.

Kasamatsu stole the basketball while Kise was reminiscing and Kise had to jump for a block, unsuccessfully. The ball circled the hoop's rim, once, twice, then dropped through and bounced: two times, three times. Kasamatsu got it on the third bounce and lobbed it at Kise so hard he was pretty sure it'd have broken his nose if he hadn't caught it instead - and it _had_ been aimed directly at his nose. "Play seriously, you fool."

Kise made a moue with his lips. "You don't have to tell me that, Kasamatsu-sempai." As if he'd go easy on Kasamatsu, or indeed, anyone.

After that it was just the ball and the hoop and the two of them, for the next forty minutes, fast and familiar and reassuring. Kasamatsu hardly ever won against Kise, but whenever he did it was a revelation, _why didn't I think of that before_, or _I didn't know I had that bad habit_, or, _Would that work against Aominechi nah probably not_. Kasamatsu didn't manage that today, but it was a good game anyway. It always was.

They collapsed on the bench after that, sipping from their water bottles, soaking in the sunlight, Kise fiddling with the ball as usual, spinning, passing from one hand to another, balancing it on the edges of his knuckles. It was a habit he'd picked up from Aomine, right at the beginning, and he'd never lost it.

Kasamatsu took two swigs of water, then said, "I meant, you're not playing basketball _with_ anyone."

Kise sighed, because he knew exactly what Kasamatsu had meant, and he hadn't really wanted to talk about it. He stuck the basketball on his forehead and kept it there, balancing. "I dunno, I wasn't exactly interested in college, and as for the pro leagues...they didn't make me any offers."

Kasamatsu thwacked him on the shoulder.

"Oww," said Kise, more concerned with keeping the basketball in place than with the pain. "Don't hit me again, Kasamatsu-sempai, the ball's going to fall off – _ouch_."

All in all there were five resounding smacks, during which Kise managed to keep the basketball perched albeit wobbly on his brow, before Kasamatsu gave a sigh, much louder than Kise's earlier one, and said, "You're expecting me to to believe that _nobody asked you to play for them_?"

"But it's true." This time there was silence and Kise leaned back against the bench, half-watching the ball as he kept it there, half-looking up and out at the light-filled sky, open and vast with possibility. "It's true, Kasamatsu-sempai. There was one invitation, early on, from a JBL team, but I didn't want to play for them so I turned them down. Then that film from last spring got a foreign release, and I got the MTV Award, and the Versace contract happened, and I guess... maybe after that nobody seriously thought I would stick with basketball?" The scouts who came knocking for Murasakibara often looked at Kise with avid interest, with avarice even, as if they would have liked to make him an offer, but none of them had ever come out and said anything.

"_You_ contact them, then. Tell them you're interested."

Kise sent the ball flying upwards with a flick of his head and then caught it in midair. "That'd be kind of embarrassing, Kasamatsu-sempai. Besides, I'm not even sure that I want to go pro."

He'd expected a recurrence of the usual physical attacks, was ready for it, but all he got was Kasamatsu staring at the ground, silent, until the former captain said, "What do you really want, then?"

It was a serious question and deserved a serious answer, but it was a question Kise had asked himself, and he'd only been able to come up with one reply. "To play for Kaijou forever." He saw the frown lines on Kasamatsu's face deepen and forged on. "I am being serious. That's what I wanted. Playing for Kaijou – against Aominechi – against Kurokochi. All of them." He'd long lost the capacity to apologise for what he was.

Kasamatsu looked back at him and let out a huff of annoyed breath. "You are such a incredibly annoying person. You absolutely never ever change, you little idiot."

"I do wish I could," Kise said, quite sincerely. It would be easier and truer and perhaps he would be prouder of himself.

Then again, perhaps he wouldn't be.

#

Despite moving into Midorima's former room Aomine remained in resolute and determined possession of the sofa, occupying the thing every waking minute that he wasn't playing basketball and sometimes when he was. As far as Kise could tell Aomine ate meals at the sofa, napped on it, watched television, and otherwise spent at least fourteen hours out any given day attached to to it. He even practised little dribbles and passing motions with his hands while lying supine on the cushions.

(Kise had the feeling he watched porn on that sofa, but the cleaners kept it white and fresh and unblemished and mostly Kise didn't _want to know_.)

Aomine's constant presence in the living room meant that he was there just about every time Kise got home, late at night or first thing in the morning, or just in the middle of the day, like whenever Kise got back from a photoshoot early. It wasn't like Kise had ever held any real expectations of his Teikou teammates (other than that they would play basketball, and play it like no one else in the world could) but Aomine seemed to engage in even less goal-directed activity than Murasakibara did, and sometimes Kise felt oddly lonely, as if he were the only gainfully employed young adult in the whole world.

"I have a job," Aomine pointed out, after Kise tactfully suggested that he find part-time work, or a hobby, or a girlfriend, or well, anything. "Pre-season hasn't started, that's all."

"You've been watching Channel V for _four hours_," said Kise. "Can't you go to the park and catch insects, like you used to do with Momochi?"

Aomine yawned. "Too far. Can't be bothered." He eyed Kise speculatively. "Wanna go one-on-one? Didn't get to play with Murasakibara since he's gone back to his old bad habits. He spent the whole morning taste testing curry sauce brands and then telling me he hated basketball, like I was actually going to believe him or something."

He still had a press conference that evening and a game with Aomine would certainly go too long, too hard, and too close to the edge, but by this point in their lives Kise's acquiescence was basically Pavlovian. "Sure, I'll get changed."

Playing basketball with Aomine was exactly the best thing in the world: terrible and off-kilter and overwhelmingly perfect. Win against Aomine, lose against Aomine, nothing had changed in five years – the anticipation, the constant shifting velocities, the crazed movements of the ball as it went back and forth, over and under and around.

The only damper on the experience was the worry, longstanding and quite well-founded, that Kise would never feel the same way about anything or anyone again, within basketball or without. When it came down to it he didn't have words for what Aomine had meant and still meant to him; it wasn't that the other boy was inimitable or unsurpassable or irredeemably a basketball idiot (although he was all of those things), but rather that Aomine was a fixed moment in time, an event from which Kise would never recover.

Most days he believed that Aomine was the one and only, his lightning from a cloudless sky. He didn't have a right to expect his life to be changed like that again.

He played and Aomine answered; and then Aomine played and Kise answered, instinctively and unwaveringly and true.

#

Akashi stayed with them briefly at the end of summer, a final reunion before he left to study at Harvard. For a marvellous three weeks the household was a miracle of efficiency: benchtops wiped down, bedsheets ironed, unwashed socks and food stains and clutter vanished into thin air as if they'd never existed in the first place. Even the fifteen basketballs they owned between the four of them were cleaned, reinflated, and then arranged on the rack according to colour.

All this happened without Akashi apparently lifting a single finger to do housework.

"Aka-chin can't cook," shrugged Murasakibara, when Kise pressed him for explanations as to how he'd gone from burning toast to preparing three-course dinners for four every night.

"I like being _alive_ more than I hate cleaning," Aomine had explained, succinctly and sufficiently; Kise had left it at that.

Akashi for his part remained true to form, spending most of his time at the coffee table, playing shougi against himself, or else seated quietly in a lounge chair staring at his Android tablet (still playing shougi against himself). If it were anyone else, Kise would be wondering why he'd gone to the trouble of visiting Tokyo just to not interact with anyone, but it was Akashi, who always had a purpose, whether the rest of them could figure it out or not.

Akashi invited Midorima and Kuroko over, on the rare evenings Kise was both free and in town, and for those brief occasions it was the six of them again, practising the way they used to practise, only faster higher stronger these days. They played three-on-three, or two-on-two, or one-on-four or whatever combination Akashi was running through his head at the time, as if he were trying to create neverending variations on victory.

Akashi didn't always play but when he did, he won; this too, was exactly the way it was in middle school. Akashi liked winning more than he liked basketball, they'd always known. Even Kuroko had learned over the years to live with this fact.

"You never change, Akashichi," said Kise, the night before Akashi flew to the United States. "You're as amazing as ever, you know?"

Akashi did not look up from the shougi board he was poring over. "You haven't changed either, Ryouta. The fact that you remain reliant on other people to galvanise you into decision has not altered one whit."

Kise lowered his lashes, eyes narrowing. "That feels like you're picking on me, Akashichi. Been a while since that last happened." He leaned back against the breakfast counter; smiling, but more or less ready for anything Akashi might say. There was no point in heading into a conversation with Akashi without being prepared to hold your own.

Akashi held up a rook piece and examined it, considering. "When do you plan to make your choice regarding professional basketball?"

That gave Kise pause. Akashi never asked you what you were going to do with your life; generally he just _knew_. "If I had a plan, I'd have made the choice, wouldn't I?"

"That is a fair point," Akashi agreed, playing his piece.

Kise came up to the lounge set and flopped into the couch opposite Akashi. "What do you think I should choose, Akashichi?"

Akashi looked up and met his eyes. "I have no thoughts on what you _should_ do. My only interest is that you remember that winning is ultimate." He picked up the tablet lying at his side, the fingers of his left hand moving elegantly across the touchscreen. Several seconds later they heard the printer in Kise's study come to life.

"Get the printout," said Akashi, and then Kise was moving down the corridor, without even thinking about it, so ingrained was his habit of obedience.

He found two sheets of A4 paper, each containing a list of a half-dozen names on them, and returned to the living area, still puzzling over them.

"The first sheet is a list of bj-league participants who have a greater than sixty percent chance of winning against Aomine's team within the next two years – if you were playing for them." Akashi captured a pawn on the board.

"It's not – about Aomine," Kise said. Or at least it wasn't only about Aomine, although enough of it was, a significant part of it was – actually, what was he saying, this was _Akashi_, Akashi didn't give a crap about this stuff, for goodness' sake. Do or do not, that was Akashi to the core. The reasons, the motivations – Akashi was only interested in those insofar as they affected results.

"If you say so." Akashi seemed unperturbed. "Your perfomance in matches tends to be 50% better in the lead-up to a game against Kuroko or Aomine. But have a look at the second page, which is a list of European professional teams that would sign you on based on our reputation. They're all well-positioned to allow you to maintain your modelling career as well as play for them.

"Where's the list of options where I don't go pro at all?" asked Kise.

Akashi just stared at him until Kise started looking for holes in the floor to bury himself in. "Okay, okay. Thank you, Akashichi."

He was about to put the two pieces of paper away in his room when Akashi spoke: "To reiterate, I have no opinion whatsoever about what decision you make here. But don't you dare forget that I'm the one who leads you. That will not change."

The words were as they'd always been, calm and absolute, and this was part of what Kise did not want to let go of, too; Akashi's foresight and certainty and his inability to break a promise, at Teikou, and beyond Teikou, and now it felt like, beyond basketball itself.

#

"And why am I suddenly your emotional confidante?" demanded Midorima. Kise had gone over to visit Midorima's apartment this morning. Midorima was a terrible host. The only drink he kept in the fridge was canned red bean soup, and the first words he'd said upon seeing Kise had been, "Oha Asa did say today would be a complete waste of my time."

"You can't leave me in the lurch," Kise objected. They were seated at the low square table that dominated Midorima's otherwise bare living room. Midorima had ended up serving Kise boiled tap water in a teacup. "It's not like I can talk to Murasakibarachi or Aominechi. It wasn't that long ago, you remember what they're like, surely."

Midorima shuddered minutely at the recollection. "Still. You must have minions from your old school who are willing to put up with your unsophisticated angst."

"You're breaking my heart here, Midorimachi. Can't you at least pretend you care, for twenty minutes?"

"Ten minutes," said Midorima, setting the stopwatch on his phone.

"Every time I meet you I remember all over again how good you are at ruining the atmosphere," began Kise.

"Nine minutes fifty one seconds," Midorima warned, and Kise got on with it.

"So Akashichi's going to college in the US, and Kagamichi too. You and Kurokochi, you're both in uni. Aominechi's in the bj-league. Murasakibarachi's not doing anything, but he'll go pro soon enough as well, I guess."

"I am assuming there is a point to your rambling." Midorima took another small swallow of red bean soup. "Getting to it sooner rather than later would be nice."

"What I mean," Kise gave a sigh, "is that it feels like we're all breaking up."

"Please," said Midorima in a pained voice, "I would really prefer it if you broke your habit of phrasing things that way."

Kise ignored him in favour of flopping back against the tatami mat. "Do you know how jealous I am that you still get to play against Kurokochi? Ah, I want to play against him again."

Midorima was quiet for several moments and then snorted. "_This_ is what you came to me to complain about? Are you a child? You can't play basketball with all your friends and so you're feeling lonely?"

"It's not that. Well, it's not _just_ that." Kise closed his eyes. "I think I have to decide whether or not to quit modelling." There was no response from Midorima and eventually Kise sat up and opened his eyes again, only to find Midorima intent on his phone. "Come on, Midorimachi, you could at least listen attentively for my allotted ten minutes."

"I'm checking Oha Asa Online. She says those born under Gemini shouldn't make any important decisions today." Midorima slid his phone shut. "Where did you get the idea that you should quit modelling?"

"Well," said Kise. "I really feel like no one will take me seriously as a basketball player, if I don't give it up. And it takes a lot of time. I'm sitting in planes and walking down catwalks and having people blowdry my hair and in the meantime Aominechi and Murasakibarachi are just shooting hoops, all day, every day."

"Aomine spent more time watching K-pop music videos than he did playing basketball when I was staying at your place," Midorima adjusted his spectacles. "More to the point, I can't imagine where you got the idea that you needed or wanted to be like those two idiots. I guess you're a bit of an idiot yourself, but still."

Kise tried to remember why he thought talking to Midorima would be a good idea. "I guess I feel like I'm being left behind, that's all. I always felt like I was being left behind, you know, back then."

Midorima switched over to the stopwatch function on his phone; it showed two minutes and two seconds remaining. "Kise. Do you remember when you texted me from Zurich last week?"

He remembered; it'd been right before a show and he'd been excited and nervous and he'd texted basically everyone he knew. "Uh, yes?"

"At three in the morning?"

Well, it hadn't been until all the messages had been sent that he'd remembered to think about time zones. "I'm very very sorry."

"The week before that it was Manhattan, and the week before that, Sydney. You've been doing this since we were at Teikou. I'm sure ten years from now I'll still be receiving the same utterly stupid and irrelevant SMSs from you, regardless of where you're working or living." Midorima placed his bandaged hand on the table. "And if you think that in ten years I'm going to lose to you at basketball just because I've decided to become a doctor, well then, you've got several humiliating defeats coming your way."

The stopwatch ran to zero.

"Time's up," said Midorima. "Don't bother me with such infantile nonsense again."

Kise stood. "Thanks, Midorimachi. I'll be sure to call next time I need advice."

"Did you actually listen to a single word I said?"

Midorima scowled, and Kise, smiling, let himself out the front door.

#

Kuroko didn't visit the apartment that often these days, and whenever he did his time was monopolised by Aomine, which meant that Kise hadn't talked to him properly in months, really; probably not since the final Winter Cup. So it was a surprise to arrive home at the end of a longish day and find Kuroko sitting at the dining table, engrossed in a paperback novel.

"Where's Aominechi?" he asked, sliding into the seat opposite Kuroko.

"Buying food," said Kuroko, politely bookmarking his book and closing it. "How are you doing, Kise-kun?"

Kise gave him a coy look. "How do I look like I'm doing, Kurokochi?"

"Aomine-kun said your game was off, these days," volunteered Kuroko.

That was a surprise – not that Kuroko would come out with it, all bluntlike, that was totally normal, but that Aomine would have bothered mentioning it to Kuroko. Normally when Aomine thought you weren't playing hard enough he just upped the ante until you had no choice _but_ to play hard enough – either that or he walked off the court in annoyance, but he hadn't done that to Kise in a while, thank God, rejection from Aomine always felt like Kise's heart was being filleted to pieces.

"He told you that? I feel kind of pathetic now, Kurokochi. I hate it when you get to see my bad side."

Kuroko didn't say anything back, just waited there patiently as per usual. Kise took a moment to say nothing and just look back at him, processing that Kuroko was actually _there_, and he hadn't thought he'd get the opportunity but while it was in front of him he might as well seize it.

"I'm just thinking," Kise said, resting his elbows on the table and supporting his chin with his hands. "about all the things I always think I'd like to say to you, but I never do. Like how much I love your basketball. Because I really love it, you know. As much as Aominechi's basketball, maybe more." Kuroko didn't answer, at least not immediately, and since Kise had kind of stored up a lot of things to tell him, he just kept going: "It's just amazing watching you play, always. And you're kind of awkward about it sometimes, and sometimes you're really ridiculously foolhardy, but in the end you're always the one who's there, who reminds us what it means to play basketball. And when it comes down to it you're the most reliable one of all of us, and-

"Kise-kun," said Kuroko. "Do you think you could tone it down a little? When you talk like that I feel as if I'm in hospital on my deathbed, and it's disconcerting."

"Ah, sorry about that. Guess I was getting a little florid there." Kise looked down at the table. "Bit of a shame if I saved all this up for your deathbed, though, don't you think?"

He smiled at Kuroko, who returned it with one of those patented barely-there smiles that practically required a degree in Kuroko Tetsuya studies to detect. "Yeah, it would be a shame. Thank you, Kise-kun."

Kise thought about what he really wanted to, really needed to say. "Would you miss me if I were gone, Kurokochi? Not dead, I mean – just somewhere else. Like say, Europe."

"Aren't you always in Europe anyway?"

"Well, in Europe even more. Only coming back to Japan for jobs and holidays. I'd only see you guys a couple times a year, maybe."

"Would you still be playing basketball?" asked Kuroko.

"One way or another, yeah. I don't know if it'd be pro basketball though. Midorimachi seems to think it's okay, that you can have two careers, but." When it came down to it, he just didn't know; whether he could be Kise Ryouta, this household name, this brand, this money-making machine, and still play the kind of basketball that would live up to Kaijou, to Aomine, to Kuroko. "Actually I have no idea if I should even go to Europe, really. Often I think my life would have gone so much better if I just listened to you more, Kurokochi." It wouldn't have been an _easier_ life, certainly, but it would have been better. "I wish you could tell me what I should do now."

"That's not something I can do for you, Kise-kun."

"Yeah," Kise gave a wry smile. "I know."

"But there is one thing I _am_ certain about," added Kuroko, "and it's that you'll always love basketball, just like Aomine-kun and Kagami-kun. And as long as you still love basketball, I don't think there's a wrong decision you can make here. So you should just do whatever you think is best."

Kise's eyes widened and then he took a slow, resigned breath. "It's that simple, huh."

"I believe it is."

He played with the thought, turning it over in his mind, and finally said, "Thank you, Kurokocchi."

A half-hour later he saw Kuroko to the front door and they made their farewells and Kise wandered back to his bedroom. He'd been living there for five months now but he was lucky to sleep there three nights out of every seven, if that; even after all this time it still retained an air of newness, of unfamiliarity.

Akashi's two printed lists lay on his bedside table, where he'd left them nearly three weeks ago. He picked up one of them.

He chose.

#

He made the announcement a fortnight later, when he and Aomine and Murasakibara were all seated around the breakfast counter, eating takeaway for dinner. Both his housemates looked extremely disinterested.

"That's good for you, Kise-chin," Murasakibara mumbled absently, rifling through paper takeaway bags in search of more tomato sauce packets to season his French fries with.

"I kind of thought you might do that," said Aomine with his mouth full, gnawing on a chicken drumstick.

"What?" Kise looked disbelievingly at Aomine. "No, you didn't."

"I so did. I'm the one who knows you best, remember?"

"No, you're not," said Kise, indignant. "I'm not _just_ my basketball style."

"Okay, fine, I had no idea what was going on. I knew something was up, though, your game was completely gone to crap. Didn't think it'd be something as trivial as this."

"Trivial," Kise echoed, wondering how Momoi had managed to face Aomine's sense of dramatic proportion, all those years, day in and day out, without going insane.

"Trivial," said Aomine dismissively. "Trivial, trivial, trivial. If you lose again tomorrow I'm gonna beat you up."

"Consider the challenge accepted." Kise threw a dangerous smile at Aomine. "You never do change, do you, Aominechi."

"Neither do you. Except for the basketball, anyway." Aomine drank down an entire can of Coke with the usual lean indifferent grace. "But yeah, not even the slightest bit."

FINIS.


End file.
